Ben Affleck stepped to the haters on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, addressing the backlash to the news that he would play Batman in the 2015 sequel to this summer’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel. After he got the role, Affleck recalled the producers warning him about the strong reactions super fans have had to previous casting news: “I was like, ‘I’m a big boy,'” Affleck cracked. “If I can handle the Emmy snub, I can handle anything!”

Figuring he was tough enough to handle the worst, Affleck broke rule number one of the Internet – don’t read the comments – and checked fan reactions when the news broke. “I look at the first comment and it’s like, ‘Ben Affleck is going to be Batman’ and the first one goes, ‘Noooooooo!'” And with that he closed the browser and washed his hands of it, joking, “We’re gonna be Luddites for a while, kids.”

Affleck, of course, is confident in his ability to pull of the Batman role without stepping at all on Christian Bale’s turn in the Dark Knighttrilogy. “[Director] Zack Snyder has this incredible take on it, and obviously you can’t do what Christian did, those movies are amazing, so he wants to do something different. So I thought this is a brilliant way to do this and I really know how to hook into this.”